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From the Precession of Simulacra

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From the Precession of Simulacra sociology under Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre. In 1966, he began teaching at the University of Paris at Nanten·e. During this time, he )Vas associated with Roland Barthes, whose ideas deeply influ- enced Baudrillard's first book, The System of Objects (1968). After reading the work of kIarshali McLuhan, Baudrillard began to see the symbolic representations of culture in mass media to be the basis for pelionning sociological analysis. After the student revolt at Nanterre in 1968, he wrote for a typicaljoumal of the time, Utopie, using Marxist analysis to critique the symbols of capitalism. He eventually came to regard Ma1:r:ism itself a sYlnbolist ideology produced by the mass culture of capi- talism, and to lose his oppositional stance against mass media and technology. His later works dis- cuss the extreme reproducibility of images and sounds through electronic media fOl111S, creating, in Baudrillard's terminology, a culture of the "hyperreal." He became maItre-assistant (assistant pro- fessor) at Nanterre from 1970 to 1987. He is curren(ly professor of philosophy of culture and media criticism at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. His books include Consumer Society (1970), For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1972), The Mirror of Production (1973), In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (1983), Simulations (1983), Forget Foucault (1987), Simulacra and Simulations (1988), Seduction (1990), The lllusion of the End (1992), The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1995), The 'perfect Crime (1996), America (1998), The Spirit of Terrorism (2001), Screened Out (2002), and Passwords (2003). Thefollowing essay is taken from Simulations. From The Precessionl of Simulacra The simulacrum is never that which conceals the become frayed and finally ruined, a few shreds truth - it is the truth which conceals that there is still discernible in the deserts - the metaphysical none. 2 beauty of this ruined abstraction, bearing witness The simulacrum is true. - ECCLESIASTES to an Imperial pride and rotting like a carcass, If we were able to take as the finest allegory of returning to the substance of the soil, rather as an simulation the Borges tale3 where the cartogra- aging double ends up being confused with the phers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed real thing) - then this fable has come full circle that it ends up exactly covering the territory (but for us, and now has nothing but the discrete where the decline of the Empire sees this map charm of second-order simulacra.4 Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, Translated by Paul Foss and Paul Patton. the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation IBalldrillard's title hinges on a scientific term that refers to the "wobble" of anything spinning that is also acted on by an is no longer that of a territory, a referential being outside force (including gravity). For example the axis of the or a substance. It is the generation by models of earth's rotation wobbles very slowly (the period is 18,600 a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The years), so that different stars have been (and in due course will territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives be) in the position now held by Polaris. One of the proofs of it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the Einstein's theory of relativity was its correct predictions about the precession in the orbit of Mercury. Possibly Baudrillard's territory - PRECESSION OF SIMULACRA - it is the point is that the ability to map our world depends on such map that engenders the territory and if we were to imperceptible phenomena. revive the fable today, it would be the territory 2Ecc1esiastes is a biblical book containing worldly. some- times cynical wisdom, but nothing remotely resembling this particular text is to be found there. 4Cf. J. Baudrillard, L'Echange syJnho/ique et fa mOrl, 3"On Exactitude in Science" (1960), by Jorge Luis Borges ("L'Ordre des simulacres"), Paris, Gallimard, 1975. (1 899-1986). [BaudrillardJ THEORIZING POSTMODERNISM whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It a metastable, programmatic, perfect descriptive is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges sub- machine which provides all the signs of the real sist here and there, in the deserts which are no and short-circuits all its vicissitudes. Never again longer those of the Empire, but our own. The will the real have to be produced - this is the desert of the real itself. vital function of the model in a system of death, In fact, even inverted, the fable is useless. or rather of anticipated resurrection which no Perhaps only the allegory of the Empire remains. longer leaves any chance even in the event of For it is with the same Imperialism that present- death. A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the day simulators try to make the real, all the real, imaginary, and from any distinction between the coincide with their simulation models. But it is no real and the imaginary, leaving room only for longer a question of either maps or territory. the orbital recurrence of models and the simu- Something has disappeared: the sovereign differ- lated generation of difference. ence between them that was the abstraction's charm. For it is the difference which forms the poetry of the map and the charm of the territory, THE DIVINE IRREFERENCE OF IlVIAGES the magic of the concept and the charm of To dissimulate is to feign not to have what one has. the real. This representational imaginary, which To simulate is to feign to have what one hasn't. both culminates in and is engulfed. by the carto- One implies a presence, the other an absence. But grapher's mad project of an ideal coextensivity the matter is more complicated, since to simulate between the map and the territory, disappears is not simply to feign: "Someone who feigns an with simulation - whose operation is nuclear illness can simply go to bed and make believe he and genetic, and no longer specular and discur- is ill. Some[oneJ who simulates an illness pro- sive. With it goes all of metaphysics. No more duces in himself some of the symptoms." (Littre)5 mirror of being and appearances; of the real and Thus, feigning or dissimulating leaves the reality its concept. No more imaginary coextensivity: principle intact: the difference is always clear, it rather, genetic miniaturization is the dimension of is only masked; whereas simulation threatens the simulation. The real is produced from miniatur- difference between "true" and "false," between ized units, from matrices, memory banks and "real" and "imaginary." Since the simulator pro- command models - and with these it can be duces "true" symptoms, is he ill or not? He can- reproduced an indefinite number of times. It no not be treated objectively either as ill, or as longer has to be rational, since it is no longer not-ill. Psychology and medicine stop at this measured against some ideal or negative instance. point, before a thereafter undiscoverable truth of It is nothing more than operational. In fact, since the illness. For if any symptom can be "pro- it is no longer enveloped by an imaginary, it is no duced," and can no longer be accepted as a fact of longer real at all. It is a hyperreal, the product of nature, then every illness may be considered as an irradiating synthesis of combinatory models in simulatable and simulated, and medicine loses its a hyperspace without atmosphere. meaning since it only knows how to treat "true" In this passage to a space whose curvature is illnesses by their objective causes. Psychosomatics no longer that of the real, nor of truth, the age of evolves in a dubious way on the edge of the ill- simulation thus begins with a liquidation of all ness principle. As for psychoanalysis, it transfers referentials - worse: by their artificial resurrec- the symptom from the organic to the unconscious tion in systems of signs, a more ductile material order: once again, the latter is held to be true, than meaning, in that it lends itself to· all systems more true than the former - but why should of equivalence, all binary oppositions and all simulation stop at the portals of the unconscious? combinatory algebra. It is no longer a question of Why couldn't the "work" of the unconscious be imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of par- It sPaul-Maximilien·Emile Liltn! (1801-1888) translated the ody. is rather a question of substituting signs of works of science of the classical period, and compiled (1854) the real for the real itself, that is, an operation to a dictional)' of medicine and surgery, from which the deter every real process by its operational double, ticn is taken. BA UDRILLARD ITHE PRECESSION OF SIMULACRA 1937 "produced" in the same way as any other symp- any simulacrum in the temples because the divin- tom in classical medicine? Dreams already are. 6 ity that breathes life into nature cannot be repre- The alienist/ of course, claims that "for each sented.,,9 Indeed it can. But what becomes of the fo= of the mental alienation there is a particular divinity when it reveals itself in icons, when it is order in the succession of symptoms, of which the multiplied in simulacra? Does it remain the simulator is unaware and in the absence of which supreme authority, simply incarnated in images the alienist is unlikely to be deceived." This as a visible theology? Or is it volatilized into sim- (which dates from 1865) in order to save at all ulacra which alone deploy their pomp and power cost the truth principle, and to escape the spectre of fascination - the visible machinery of icons raised by simulation - namely that truth, refer- being substituted for the pure and intelligible Idea ence and objective causes have ceased to exist.
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